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Friday, January 24, 2014

DIY: The Best Dinner In The History Of The World

I make it when I need an ego boost. When I’m tired of fighting over what’s for
dinner. When I’m awfully low, when I’m
feeling cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of it.

Wait a minute.

Anyway, my husband and I have somehow raised picky
eaters. Not picky in terms of will only
eat tater tots and chicken strips picky.
I’m talking food critic picky.
I’m not sure how two garbage eaters, people who have such low standards
of food quality that we once ate an entire gas station pizza off the bed in a
roadside motel, could have produced children with such high-level palates.

Take last night, for instance. I made a potato dish that took an hour and a
half from start to finish. And this was
just the side dish. The aroma was mouth-watering, the taste
delectable and perfect. The kids
eyeballed it, inquired about the ingredients, and tasted it delicately as if
deciphering whether I used sea salt or table.
My son declared “This has wine in it,” and pushed it away, and my
daughter picked at hers, finally stating, “I’m not a fan of the flavors in
this.”

Lest you think that I am a hack in the kitchen, I most
decidedly am not. I win rave reviews for most of the food I
prepare – from others, just not my children.

So you see why I might need a go-to meal, one that I can
depend on to catapult me into the stratosphere, or at least earn the title of Best Cook in their eyes.

It’s not hotdogs, nor tacos, nor McDonald’s. It contains more fresh vegetables than most
any other meal I create, with the exception of Big Salad With Croutons. It contains lean meat, a light sauce, and
despite all the chopping is relatively quick to get on the table.

It’s called – get ready for it: The Best Chicken Stir-Fry in the History of The World.

I know what you’re thinking: what is this exotic-sounding
dish? It sounds complex. Well, it’s
not. Listen up, special friend: even you
can do this.

So grab your shopping list, because here it comes.

The Best Chicken Stir-Fry in the History of The World

Ingredients:1 T. vegetable oil. You
can use any type of oil here. I
use veg, because it says veg. But once I used olive, and no one was the wiser.
Except for me, who is always the wiser.

Half a head of green
cabbage, chopped. You know what I do
with the other half? Well, sometimes I
make coleslaw, which my children love.
Kids aren’t supposed to like coleslaw, I know. We’ve already established that my kids are
weird. When I’m super mad at them I just
throw the other half of cabbage in the trash and say, “Watch this, brats! No coleslaw for you!!” No, ha ha, I don’t do that. I take it out back and feed it to the wild
rabbits.

This monster ate a whole half a cabbage that I refused to feed to my kids.

1 small zucchini,
sliced, and slices cut in half. Those
are some pretty specific cutting instructions, eh? Yes, they are. You want to hit this out of the park or don’t
you? Cut it like I said.

1 carrot, sliced. Be a man and use a real carrot, not the baby
kind. Do you know what baby carrots
are? They are adult carrots that were
subject to a kind of crushing water torture to strip them of their size and
skin to appear small. You can go for the
babies, but I don’t. I don’t like not
knowing what was in the water that tortured my carrots into submission. FYI: buying
baby carrots is like saying that carrot abuse is okay. It’s a social issue.

1 medium onion, cut
into chunks, or sliced. I hate
cutting onions. They really do make me
cry. The best part of cutting onions is
that my kids stare into my face to see if I am crying. One day my daughter asked me if onions make
me cry for real, as if there’s a chemical in them that triggers sadness. Because I always jump at the chance to educate
my children in the ways of the world, I seized this teachable moment and said
yes, darling, they do.

You may have noticed that this picture does not include all the ingredients in the recipe.It's because I didn't actually make this meal for this post.*That's right. It's how I roll.Use your imagination for the ingredients that are missing.Better yet, why don't you stop being so perfect all the time.

2 skinless, boneless chicken
breast halves, cut into 1-inch chunks. Alternately,
use about 2 ½ cups of shredded cooked chicken.
A rotisserie chicken works well here.
Seriously. It’s just
chicken. You shouldn’t really make it
complicated.

We’re almost done. It
sounds like a lot, but don’t wimp out now.

½-1 c. bottled
stir-fry sauce. BA-BAM! It’s a shortcut. I don’t know what’s in stir-fry sauce. I don’t want to know. It’s in the International section of my
grocery store, along with things like rice and beans. Because we live in the rural Northeast, where
things like rice and beans are International but things like pickled pigs’ feet
are right in there with the regular canned meats. I don’t pretend to know the secrets of the
universe.

½-1 t. ground ginger. This is the money ingredient. I’m not sure what that means.

White or brown rice,
cooked separately. Cook as much as
you and your hog family eats. Ours,
while only containing four people, is a huge hog family. My daughter and I can destroy 3 or 4 cups of
white rice because we have extreme starch and carbohydrate syndrome. It's totally a thing.

OPTIONAL: Any
combination of the following: water
chestnuts, bean sprouts, baby corns, or any traditional add-in that you
find in International. I’m not crazy
about bamboo shoots, but I imagine
they would be delicious here also if they float your particular boat.

Toppings: You can get some chow mein noodles to sprinkle over the top after cooking. Sometimes
we use them, and sometimes I eat the entire can of chow mein noodles as a
bedtime snack. Or chop up some (unsalted) peanuts or cashews to top it
JEEZ do I have to mention everything that goes with this dish?

OK – let’s cook this shizz.

Instructions:

1. First, get a wok or your largest pan or skillet. If you haven’t figured it out by now, there
are a lot of ingredients here. You have
to cook them all together. Get your big pan. We have a wok, which has two uses: 1) this
stir fry 2) holding Halloween candy on trick or treat night. Guess what we will NEVER have for dinner on
Halloween? OMG you’re a genius.

Do you see it? It's the one on the left. BOOM. Multi-tasking mother of kitchen equipment.

2. Heat the oil in your pan or wok. Add half of all the veggies (including any
optional International ingredients). Stir-fry for a few minutes until veggies are
crisp-tender but not mushy, unless you like mushy then you are a weirdo. When you’ve finished cooking those, remove
them from the pan and add the other half and cook them the same way. You may have to use more oil. I always do.
Maybe you overdid it your first go-round and don’t need more. That’s okay too. I can’t help it if you’ve got a heavy hand
with the oil bottle. I’d rather you have
a heavy hand with the wine bottle when you’re pouring me a glass, but let’s
talk about that later, shall we? Remove
the second batch of veggies from the wok.

3. Add chicken to the wok.
Stir-fry it until it is cooked through – that means no pink, unless you
like salmonella. When I use already-cooked
chicken, I still heat it in the wok because I'm wild like that. I usually just push it around the wok a
little until it becomes hot. When
chicken is cooked, push it away from the center of the wok and add the stir-fry
sauce and ginger. Stir it until it
bubbles, and then dump the veggies back into the wok and mix it all together
until heated through.

4. Serve it over hot cooked rice, and sprinkle with the
crunchy toppings. My kids always insist
on soy sauce or they just add more stir-fry sauce to their servings because
they are insane about the sauce.

Enjoy this meal as your go-to on nights when nothing is
going your way, or when everyone wants Chinese takeout but you’ve blown the
food budget on new underwear and bras. You’ll eat
this for days because it is a ton of food. You’ll also eat it for days because
it is delicious.

*I realize that not actually making this dish to go along with the post is a recipe post
no-no. However, I would like to defend my position by saying that I write extremely detailed recipes and you probably don’t
need pictures anyway. Plus, this dish, although The Best, kind of looks like garbage when it is all finished. Bon Appetit!

Thank, Galit! My kids - they don't even try to be food snobs. My son rolls the food around in his mouth to figure out all the tastes he likes/doesn't like. There is much sniffing and licking at the table. Our table manners lessons go way beyond "elbows off."

And now I want stir fry. (Although my little food critics are not fans of it - they prefer everything separate.) We are also enjoy the extra sauce on our not-mixed-together, separately stir fried rice and accompaniments.

Our daughter is a separate-foods eater, too, but she loves this dish (and any Chinese food, for that matter). I've even served this to my children's picky friends and even my ultra-picky nephew, who ate it without fanfare.

My husband says I'm a culinary pig, because I can't even distinguish 1% from 2% milk...Your recipe sounds great and I think I will make my husband cook it (because obviously someone who's a culinary pig can't cook. (Winning))

That does sound good (of course, so does the gas station pizza!!).I like your directions and recipe - and think that I could totally handle it.It does crack me up that you have little foodies!!! If I ever cook with wine or beer I have to make sure my oldest (15) doesn't see it because he would not eat it!! I'm all for his decision to never drink (more for me!) but it cracks me up that he doesn't like me to cook with it!

What is up with these kids not eating anything that has booze in it? I explain to them that the alcohol cooks away, but they still don't care. My son will walk through the door from school and say "Are you cooking with wine AGAIN?" What a prude.

I love your sense of humor. Also I want you to come cook dinner for me sometime. I'll provide the wine. We'll drink a toast after Cuppie is born. Also also, it made me kind of laugh that your kids are such food critics. Mine are, sigh, just the picky type you described first. But I'm working on 'em!

I would love to make dinner for you, Sarah! I might ask you to help, but that's half the fun of it. Plus if we drink wine we won't care what it looks like. My kids - not sure what happened there. May Cupcake be your easy eater. :)

Thank you Hillary, and welcome! I love writing recipe posts, although coming up with pictures is a challenge if you don't actually make the recipe.

Pshaw to proper food presentation. We all know that food eventually looks terrible when it gets around to being eaten. Why try to make it look pretty? Hmmm I think now I know why my kids are so suspicious of my cooking.